Liz Truss has revealed details of her meeting with Queen Elizabeth II at Balmoral just days before the monarch died in September 2022
The former prime minister has written a memoir about her 49 days as prime minister in which she will argue the primary cause of her downfall was a lack of “support for Conservative ideas” and too much support for the “global left”.
The book contains an account of her travelling to the North-east after winning the Conservative Party leadership race.
She wrote of the meeting that the late Queen “seemed to have grown frailer” since she had last been in the public eye but nevertheless they “spent around 20 minutes discussing politics”.
In excerpts published in today's Times, Truss continued: “She was completely attuned to everything that was happening, as well as being typically sharp and witty. Towards the end of our discussion, she warned me that being prime minister is incredibly ageing. She also gave me two words of advice: ‘Pace yourself.’ Maybe I should have listened.”
She described how news of the Queen’s death seemed “utterly unreal” and still came as a “profound shock”, which left her thinking: “Why me? Why now?”
Truss admitted she had not expected to lead the period of state mourning that followed the Queen’s death. Describing the protocol and state ceremony, Truss wrote that it was “a long way from my natural comfort zone”.
Truss recalled watching the Queen’s coffin being brought from Balmoral to Edinburgh, writing that she broke down “into floods of tears on the sofa” after becoming “suddenly overwhelmed by the emotion of it all”.
“Once again,” she wrote, “the grief was mixed with a feeling of awe over the sheer weight of the event, and the fact that it was happening on my watch.”
In a thinly veiled swipe at several of her peers, Truss wrote that other prime ministers may have been better able to provide “the soaring rhetoric and performative statesmanship necessary” in the days after the monarch’s death. Truss, however, said she predominantly felt profound sadness.